“Poetry,” Michael McClure has said, “is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds.” And for thirty years, whether in his early “Dionysian” lyrics or his evolving “bio-alchemical” wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structures―the shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-line―nevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provençal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClure’s Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades’ work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the author’s earlier collections. "McClure manages a series of discoveries, and his language strikes with almost flintlike suddenness and brilliance." ― Chicago Tribune Michael McClure , a founding member of the Beat Generation, has long been noted for the popularity of his dynamic poetry performances. At twenty-two he gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl . He is the co-author of the song “Mercedes Benz” and often performs with musicians, notably Ray Manzarek and Terry Riley.